The Importance of Lead Generation for Your Business

Reaching your target audience is getting harder and harder every year. The same mass advertising and email blast campaigns no longer work in today’s marketplace prompting companies to employ a more targeted approach to getting found by their clients. These activities are performed by lead generation specialists and they are one of the keys to success for your company. While many organizations already know about the importance of lead generation, there are many benefits these activities can offer your company that business leaders may not be aware of. With this in mind, let’s take a deep dive into lead generation. 

Targeting the Customers You Want

Regardless of where your customers may be located geographically, lead generation will help you better target them by collecting information about their needs and preferences. This can help you customize your product or service offering to be in accordance with their wants, needs, and interests. However, the quantity of the leads is not as important as the quality. Therefore, it is a good idea to create an ideal client profile that will include all of the attributes you would like the leads to possess. This is a focused sales strategy that tells you which potential clients are actually good prospects and which ones are not. You can use this information to create marketing materials that will resonate with your best types of clients. This will save you a lot of time, energy, and money since you will not be chasing after unprofitable leads.  

Using Lead Generation to Increase Brand Awareness 

While brand awareness and lead generation are often viewed as two separate activities, you can use one to benefit the other. In order to achieve business growth, you need your brand to be known and credible in combination with lead generation campaigns that arrive during the purchase cycle of a prospect. This is what delivers the greatest sales results. Therefore you should carefully balance the amount of time and energy you invest in each activity instead of choosing one or the other. 

However, while lead generation can help your company grow, maintaining a sales team in-house can be very expensive. In fact, the average salary for a sales manager is $57,982 annually which does not include hiring costs and benefits, bonuses, and commissions. You also have to think about the cost of training your employees. Interestingly enough, smaller companies pay the most for training; costing on average $1,888 per employee. This is one of the biggest reasons why companies choose to hire an offshore sales team since they will be able to save on both labor and overhead costs. 

Fill Up Your Sales Funnel 

Having quality leads in your sales funnel is the basis for all of your sales activities. Regardless of how good your sales professionals may be, they will need to have people who they can contact to get the process started. According to Salesforce, in the B2B sector, the conversion rate from lead to opportunity is 13% and the opportunity to deal is even lower at just 6%. Based on these numbers, think about how many leads you would need to meet your revenue goals for the month. Let’s say that you would like to have $1,000,000 in revenue at the end of the month and your average sale price is $10,000. If we divide your revenue goal by your average sale price we can get the number of leads we would need to reach this goal, which is 100 leads. Now, keep in mind that 100 is the absolute minimum because only 13% of those leads will convert to opportunities and 6% of those will convert into sales. Therefore, in reality, you will need a lot more leads to reach your goals and lead generation efforts are the best way to do that. 

Increase Conversion Rates 

As we saw from the conversion rates above, a lot of the leads that you generate will not convert to the next stage of the sales cycle. However, to increase the amount that do, you will need to nurture the lead until they are ready to move on to the next stage. This means that you will need to build a relationship with the people you are contacting by phone or email and provide them with the necessary information they need to alleviate any doubts they may have. This can be something as simple as checking in from time-to-time, setting up email drip campaigns, or even communicating with them on a daily basis. All of these activities will help you build trust with your lead and prospect, thus increasing the chances of a conversion. 

Mindy Support Can Assemble a Remote Lead Generation Team for You

According to data from the Marketing Leadership Council, the average B2B company spends anywhere from 6-10% of gross sales on lead generation. Growth-oriented companies will spend a lot more at 10-25%. If your company is spending so much money on lead generation, then you need to get the most value for your money. Mindy Support can help you do just that by assembling an offshore lead generation team that will help you reduce overhead costs, thus making your money go even further. We are one of the largest BPO providers in Eastern Europe with more than 2,000 employees in six locations all over Ukraine. Regardless of the number of employees you need, we will be able to source and recruit the necessary amount of candidates quickly to help you meet deadlines and KPIs. 

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin